Slow & Steady Seduction
by VampirePam
Summary: Sex is what John and Dorian have been having for awhile now. What it turns into that night is something else entirely - something that has Dorian realizing just how human he really is.


It was past ten when John knocked on his door, but it didn't matter - Dorian didn't sleep. He also didn't have any idea what to do with the extraneous hours in his day. In truth, his partner's increasingly frequent late-night arrivals provided welcome distraction.

On this particular night, he found John more impatient than usual, a six-pack of beer in one hand, and a nearly imperceptible tremor in the other. "You dreamin' of electronic sheep or something? I've been out here for ages!"

"Philip K. Dick." Dorian stepped aside to let his partner in. "A step up from your usual brand of mockery."

"Oh well, I aim to please." John stalked into the apartment and deposited the beer on the counter. Dorian watched in amusement as he extracted a bottle and hit it against the counter one, two, three times until the cap dented and fell off.

"I conveyed your regrets to your date, since you refused to." Dorian didn't feel the effects of alcohol, but since the ritual of it seemed to please John, he copied his partner's gesture and opened a beer of his own.

"Look, what do you want from me? I had more important places to be." John avoided his eye, taking a sip from his beer. "And anyway, this whole charade was your idea, not mine. Never mind I've still got no idea why you insisted on it in the first place."

"Because I intend to prove myself to this department. And whatever we are - whatever this thing is that we're doing - could jeopardize that. Nobody's expecting much of me, but a guy like you going dateless for too long would raise questions I can't afford."

"However you want it, man." John raised his hands in supplication. "No skin off my teeth keeping it on the DL. Not like I'm itching to 'shout it from the rafters,' anyway."

"As I recall, you seemed rather eager to vocalize your approval of the situation last time." The slight blush that tinged John's cheeks as he focused rather more intently than necessary on his beer would have been imperceptible to a human, but Dorian's sensors missed nothing.

"Oh, shut up," John muttered. As he waved a hand at Dorian, his sleeve slipped a little up his wrist, revealing a loosely constructed bracelet of twine and clay beads.

"Funny, I wouldn't have pegged you as an accessories kind of guy." The near instantaneous shift of John's expression from confusion to embarrassed realization to defensiveness gave Dorian's emotion analyzers quite the test.

"Kid gave it to me." John ran his fingers over it almost absently; Dorian noticed he made no attempt to remove it. "Said something about it being good luck."

"All things considered, you could use it," Dorian observed. He resisted an inexplicable urge to reach forward and toy with those beads, knowing it would spur John to retreat once more.

His thoughts must have shown on his face, for John quickly interjected, "Nope, don't look at me like that - that probing, sympathetic thing you pull out for the bereaved housewives - if I wanted to talk about my 'feelings,' I'd be shacking up with Stahl right about now."

"Hey, man, I didn't say a damn thing. You want to project your own issues onto me, that's on you."

"Didn't know freshman psych classes were part of your programming." John tossed what remained of his first beer into the recycling and opened a second. "And anyway, why are talking about me? You're the one who basically saw someone die tonight."

Dorian frowned. He hadn't counted on John remembering. "I thought feelings were off limits."

"_My _feelings are. Doesn't mean we can't talk about yours every now and again. I've been told that's what partners are for."

Was John really serious? Dorian wasn't even sure he'd accepted that Dorian _had _feelings, let alone wanted him to talk about them. Then again, twelve hours ago he wouldn't have said John was the type to wear something a child had made. Maybe it was worth taking the chance.

He turned to the wall to avoid seeing in the look on John's face whether his gamble would pay off. "What they did to Vanessa...is that what's going to happen to me, man? One day they'll decide that I'm 'no longer regulation' and that's it - tossed on the scrap heap, with nothing but a few solved cases for anyone to remember me by?"

For a few long moments, there was no response. _Just make an excuse_. _You both have to work in the morning. You're calling it an early ni- _

John's hands were startlingly warm on his shoulders as they shifted him roughly around. "I would _never_ let that happen. Okay?"

Dorian nodded, slowly. Immediate analysis indicated that John's pupils were dilated, his heartbeat a rapid 112 beats per minute, and his temperature a good 1.6 degrees above normal. Attraction, undoubtedly...but was that the end of it?

John must have felt the shift, too, for he added quickly, "Took me long enough to break you in - don't like the thought of them sticking me with an MX again." The laugh that followed was short, the smile almost nervous.

Dorian was surprised to note that his own heartbeat appeared to be rising. 106, 107, 108 beats per minute. Along with it rose up another inexplicable desire, and this time he decided to see what would happen if he ceded to it.

"Besides," he murmured before any further analysis could change his mind, "An MX couldn't do this." His lips were on John's in less than a second. Sensing no response, he worried that he had miscalculated. But then John's lips were moving against his, he was letting out a breath he hadn't needed to take, and 109, 110, 111...

It was fitting, he supposed, that he should still be running the numbers. That was, after all, why he had agreed to the arrangement in the first place - wanting to test the limits of his own humanity. As for John...he'd tried to brush it off the first time as a drunken mistake, but Dorian had known better. The time after that he'd blamed it on wanting to take his mind off a tough case. Neither of them had found it necessary to justify things after that.

John's hands encircled his waist, his thumbs hooking in the belt loops of Dorian's jeans and running small circles over the skin beneath his shirt. He was just beginning to enjoy the feel of John's skin against his, the casual claiming he had witnessed many times between sexually intimate couples...

...when his mind betrayed him, and in an instant he was thinking of Vanessa: her unknowing, friendly flirtation, the way she enjoyed making Rudy uncomfortable - the moment all the light had gone out of her eyes.

Dorian only realized that he'd pulled back when John's hand was suddenly under his chin, dragging him back to reality. The look on his face was bordering on inscrutable, but Dorian could pick up hints beneath the surface - concern, want, and something strangely akin to fondness - which seemed to amount to John asking him, in his typically repressed, taciturn fashion, if he was okay.

This thought was so oddly reassuring that Dorian found himself falling almost involuntarily against John once more. This time John did not content himself with glancing touches; his arms slid possessively around Dorian's torso, fingers bunching in his shirt. `

Dorian accessed whatever data he had on the topic of what John liked before sliding his hands around his waist. He tugged the shirt free before running his hands up under it, enjoying the growl John made when he skimmed his nails over his skin.

It was strange...every other time they'd done this, Dorian had made a point of recording every detail: what body language meant, _Yes, right there_, and what was code for _What the hell was that?!_

But on this particular night, all such minutia had begun to blur together. Had he removed his own shirt, or had John slipped it off when he was skimming his teeth along Dorian's neck? When precisely had they moved into the bedroom? And why did he continue to feel warmer the more they undressed?

John's fingers toyed impatiently with the closure on his pants, to the point that Dorian rolled his eyes and tugged them off himself. When he moved to unbutton John's fly however, he found his hands quickly batted away.

Dorian looked up, surprised, but John dodged his gaze. His initial scan revealed nothing new - elevated heart rate, of course, but that was caused by arousal...wasn't it? Another look at John's face made him less sure.

It hit him in a flash. Dorian had been attributing the fact that they hadn't gotten properly undressed before to haste and a personal preference on John's part. It had never occurred to him that he was almost certainly the first person John had been with since he'd woken up...and, more importantly, since he'd lost his leg.

The realization that maybe he wasn't the only one there trying to figure himself out filled Dorian with a rush of...something. He mirrored John's earlier gesture and placed a hand on the side of his partner's face. An invitation.

After a few beats, John raised his head. When he opened his mouth as if to speak, however, Dorian cut him off with a kiss - not a claiming scrape of teeth on lips, just a light resting of lips on lips. _It's okay. I get it. It's okay. _

John's fingers wrapped around his forearms and clung there. When he did break the kiss, he gave Dorian a little shove onto the bed. Though Dorian expected John to follow suit, he remained by the edge of the bed.

John stood there for a little while, eyes closed, breathing deliberate. Dorian half-thought of saying something, but his newly discovered instincts said to wait. Finally, after eight and a half seconds, John reached down to interlace his fingers with Dorian's, before guiding them to his belt buckle.

Dorian looked up, surprised. He tilted his head a little to the side, expression plaintive, wordlessly requesting confirmation. John gave him a curt, little nod and his fingers a light squeeze before releasing them.

Dorian felt illogically as if John's nerves had somehow transferred themselves over. His fingers were shaking as he undid the clasp of the buckle and slid the leather from its confines. His heart raced. Finally, he rested his forehead against John's solar plexus, a moment of peace before a leap of faith.

_Just relax_, he commanded himself, undoing John's fly, _take it slow. _When he began to slide down the waistband, Dorian could feel John's breath hitch. He looked up again; the split second of panic on John's face was quickly replaced with determination as he muttered, "Oh for fuck's sake-" and shrugged out of his pants himself.

He'd told himself that he shouldn't stare, wouldn't stare, but once face to face with the prosthesis, Dorian found he couldn't help himself. The tech was exceptional - Dorian figured he was one to know - but what was truly mesmerizing was how seamlessly it had integrated with John's body.

He reached out a hand and slowly, reverently ran it along the seam at John's [pelvic bone], where flesh met synthetic, stopping just at the black elastic of his briefs,. "It's..." Dorian was unsure of the word.

"Horrifying?" John muttered looking away, "Unnatural? Freakish?"

"Actually," Dorian said with a smile, "I was going to say 'hot'."

The only thing stimulating him more was the look on John's face of surprise, sudden and unguarded. Dorian brought his other hand to John's waist and tugged him down onto the bed.

He'd been expecting a fight - truthfully, since the beginning - but John fell easily enough. By the time Dorian caught John's gaze again, the brief flicker of uncertainty had vacated it. In its place was want, raw enough to shock Dorian's processing centers into freezing up.

When they roared back to life again, John was everywhere - lips crushing Dorian's; hips grinding against his, a few thin layers of fabric all that prevented the encounter from being _much _shorter in duration; skin lightly grazing skin in a thousand new places at once.

Dorian tried to record his observations for posterity - this amount of direct contact was, after all, an untried frontier - but gave up quickly in the face of such an avalanche of data. He'd read about areas of the body that were supposed to be calibrated more intensely to touch; he wondered vaguely if the men who'd designed him had given him more than his share.

Finally, as John's ministrations grew more frantic, Dorian gave up the pretense and into the moment. As intoxicating as it was to have this much of John to touch, Dorian found the mere fact of closeness to be equally thrilling.

Perhaps this shouldn't have been a surprise - John had more interior walls than the average apartment complex, and Dorian had spent many fruitless hours looking for ways to knock them down. Now here he was, metaphorically and (almost) literally naked before him, and all Dorian could want was _more_.

They were close enough that he could feel John's breath on his cheek, hot air expelled in haphazard puffs. His pupils, meanwhile, were huge and dark, the effect heightened by the dim lamplight of the bedroom.

Keeping one hand on the side of John's face, Dorian slid the other down his torso before letting it linger on John's hip, the fingers toying with the waistband of his boxers. He searched John's face for any trace of apprehension, but did not find it.

In an instant John's hand had closed over Dorian's and was soon sliding the boxers down his legs before impatiently kicking them off altogether. He cocked his head to the side with a brief, though blinding flash of smile - a clear challenge.

Dorian kissed him - a fleeting brush of lip on lip - before guiding John's hand to the hem of his boxers: challenge accepted. John spent more haste removing Dorian's boxers he had his own, until they too lay on the floor, the last barrier between them finally discarded.

With sudden fervor, John's hands were cupping his ass and pulling him closer, closer, closer, until their limbs were so hopelessly entangled that Dorian had the strangest sensation that he could no longer tell precisely which belonged to John and which to him.

When he finally reached down to take John in hand, Dorian took his own pleasure in watching the instinctive arching back of his partner's head, the exquisite curve of his exposed throat, the rapid rise and fall of his chest as he fought for control over his own body.

But as much as he savored this unobstructed view, Dorian realized with some small astonishment that it was not what he wanted. He threaded the fingers of his spare hand through John's hair and gently pulled his head back down so they were looking at one another once more.

Beneath the obvious lust, an expression first of confusion, then comprehension, and finally absolute wonder flitted over John's face. Dorian continued his steady rhythm and waited; it was a lot to ask, this he knew. Still he hoped.

So intensely was his focus on John's face that he didn't notice the hand sliding up his thigh until a sharp burst of sensation hurtled through his body. He gasped instinctively, as if to hold in the breath he did not need to take, and was shocked when John not only kept his gaze but mirrored Dorian's own position, wrapping his other hand around the back of Dorian's neck.

Dorian tightened his grip, then sped up his rhythm. John's lips parted. A low moan, then a grin. John matched pace, and then it was Dorian doing the moaning. Still, neither looked away.

In their time working together, Dorian had flattered himself that he'd gotten to know John pretty well - certainly better than anyone else at the precinct. But looking into his eyes at this moment, he realized that he'd been wrong. This John, the open book, the flash of smile, the source of such untapped wells of potent sensation, was a _revelation_.

In what paradoxically seemed both an age and an instant - though in reality it was closer to 140 seconds - they were both teetering on the edge. Dorian's nails dug into the back of John's neck, instinctive response to the exquisite torment of the sensations threatening at every turn to overwhelm him.

John's grimace of pain turned quickly to a wicked grin - he slowed down so abruptly that Dorian let out a sound he was rather afraid would be classified as a whimper. "Uncool," he whispered, taking his revenge by returning the favor.

John hissed loudly, though the grin soon returned. "Bastard," he murmured in return, almost fondly. He leaned forward to rest his forehead on Dorian's.

Dorian relented first, with John following seconds after. Their new joint acceleration was so complete, so in sync that Dorian even found himself taking breaths he had no need of in time with his partner. A contest no longer. Now it was a dance.

In little time at all, they were back at the edge again, and this time there was no going back. Dorian inclined his head to the right, his expression intended as a combination of _please _and _ready?_ The slightest of nods from John before -

The first crest dragged a moan from his lips. A strange current shot through his body, electrifying his extremities before being overshadowed by the sudden heat searing his skin.

By the time the second hit, Dorian had returned to himself enough to open the eyes he'd instinctively shut. In that instant, he had the inexplicable feeling that time was standing still. John's eyes were still closed, and for a moment, Dorian just watched.

John's face was flushed, the strands of his dark hair askew, his skin almost glowing with perspiration. As his own orgasm ripped through him, John's eyes flew open again - his gaze pierced Dorian to the core.

The confusion returned, but this time it was not their limbs that seemed impossibly mixed, but their sensations. Dorian burned, and John groaned. The current peaked, and John shook beneath his fingers.

It was at that moment that he was struck with _the_ thought: he'd found it - a perfectly human moment. And it was...intoxicating. Between the physical stimuli he was personally sensing - for which he certainly owed some programmer an enormous thank you - and those he he was experiencing only through John, Dorian had never felt less synthetic.

So as John let out one last labored exhale, Dorian had to kiss him - a gentle press of lips on lips, just enough to steal the breath as it left John's lungs. Lips were soon pressing back, then he was falling. It wasn't until he came in contact with the softness of the pillow that it occurred to Dorian that part had literally been true.

Dorian drifted back a little, but kept his eyes closed. He wanted to draw out this moment for as long as he could - even with little experience with intimate human interactions, Dorian knew that somewhere between the beer on the counter and the boxers on the floor, they'd crossed a Rubicon, and there was no going back.

But here, limbs tangled around John, artificial oxytocin making him feel more relaxed than someone who didn't need to sleep and thus never felt tired should logically be able to manage, everything was stunningly simple. There were no awkward conversations, or mismatched social cues, no word or look of regret that would sting him more than he'd ever say aloud.

Dorian was startled from his reverie by the feel of fingers brushing against his cheek. To his great relief, the John in his field of vision didn't seem to be regretful - on the contrary, the tension usually lurking just beneath his features seemed to have dissipated, leaving him looking more serene than Dorian had ever seen him.

"Coffee," John said suddenly. His fingers slid up to toy idly with Dorian's hair.

Dorian's utter inability to calculate his meaning must have shown on his face, because John repeated, "Coffee - do you have it, or am I going to have to make a run in the morning?"

Just like that. No requests disguised as observations, no feigned give and take, nothing at all to suggest that it had not always been like this. That Dorian's nights hadn't always ended with John, naked in his bed, demanding to know the contents of his pantry.

"I think Stahl brought me some," Dorian said finally, operating under the principle that answering the question was a better idea than staring blankly at his partner ad infinitum. "Part of her misguided housewarming attempts."

John laughed - a short, bright sound that Dorian could feel in his own gut. "I was wondering where those throw pillows had come from. Typical Stahl." He leaned back a little and stretched contentedly, very much like one of those cats he insisted he didn't like.

Though they were still in a loose embrace, Dorian was swiftly realizing that was no longer enough. Not after what he'd just experienced. Maybe it was his turn to start taking liberties.

Dorian shifted so his head was resting on John's chest, his left hand splayed over John's hipbone... and waited. After a few torturous seconds, John simply stretched again and draped his own arms over Dorian's back.

Dorian could hear his breathing evening out, could feel his pulse dropping, and knew that his partner must be on the borderline of sleeping and waking. Maybe if there were enough nights like this, he would see if that was yet another door John could help him to open.

Bracelets. Belt buckles. Stolen breath. Coffee. Brightly colored dots on a canvas, waiting for just the right angle to make a picture. Dorian didn't have all the dots in place yet, but lying there on John's chest, listening to the exquisitely regular beats of his heart, he felt, for the first time, like maybe, just maybe, someday he _would_.


End file.
